The United States Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to reinterpret the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, finding that the executive order he issued on the first day of his second term in office, which sought to redefine birthright citizenship unilaterally, was improper and unlawful. In a 6-3 ruling in a case titled Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts…
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The Supreme Court held today in Chatrie v. United States that the government conducted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it acquired digital records about the cell phone location of a man accused of robbing a bank. This means that police generally need a warrant to obtain your location information from a service provider like Google. But what this means for other types of private information or media held digitally by countless service providers we rely upon daily is all but clear.At issue was whether law enforcement can use a “geofence warrant” to demand location information from Google about customers, here including Okello Chatrie, whose phones happened to be near a crime scene. The government’s answer: Yes, because once you share your location with Google, you have no Fourth Amendment interest in it and a warrant isn’t required anyway.
The Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows from that ownership?
The Court disagreed. Privacy advocates are celebrating. But Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion missed the opportunity to declare that a person’s location data belongs to him, even if it is stored on the servers at a company like Google. The majority calls the records “his” freely, even likening them to Chatrie’s own emails and photos. What it refuses to do is let that ownership decide the case. And thus, the privacy test stays what it has been since 1967: whether “society” is prepared to recognize a person’s “expectation of privacy” as reasonable.
So the Court leaves unasked the questions its own possessives raise: Whose records are these, and what follows
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday to allow President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) without citing due cause, upending decades of precedent that restricted presidents from removing political appointees from independent commission boards. Commissioners of the FTC Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, both of whom were appointed by Democrats…
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On Monday, the Supreme Court declined President Donald Trump’s request to review a 2023 verdict that found him liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump is legally required to pay Carroll the $5 million, as directed in 2023. On his Truth Social account, Trump posted, “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a…
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a fiery dissent Monday in the Supreme Court’s decision backing President Donald Trump’s power to fire members of independent federal agencies, describing the Republican-appointed majority’s ruling as one that cuts away at the Constitution.
Inside the chambers, Sotomayor spent nearly 20 minutes reading from the bench her dissenting opinion in Trump v. Slaughter — an uncommon practice for a dissenting justice.
In a defiant tone, and with palpable anger, she described the decision held as one that “reshapes the structure of government in a fundamental way,” by giving the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches.”
The decision allowing Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, without cause upends a 1935 precedent that had protected the independence of agencies.
In doing so, Sotomayor said, the court is transforming the president’s “duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”
Sotomayor said the court is furthering an “absolutist” view of presidential power, and that there should be a “counterbalance” to it. She called the ruling a “profoundly destabilizing result.”
Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, read from her dissent in a different case last week when her Republican colleagues allowed the Trump administration to turn away asylum seekers who have not set foot on U.S. soil.
Fallon Gallagher and Jordan Rubin contributed reporting.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
The post Sotomayor blasts court’s ruling allowing Trump to fire agency heads appeared first on MS NOW.
Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.
More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.
“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.
“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.
In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.
“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in